When creating a repository, you can choose to make it public or private. Public repositories are accessible to everyone using GitHub.com, while private repositories are accessible to you and the people you share them with.

Repository owners, people with admin permissions for an organization-owned repository, and organization owners can change a repository's visibility.

For organization-owned repositories, if an organization owner has restricted the ability to change repository visibility to organization owners only, people with admin permissions to a public repository cannot make it private.

If you're using GitHub Free, private repositories owned by a personal account may have up to three collaborators. If you have added more than three other users as repository collaborators, you'll need to reduce the number of collaborators to three or fewer before making the repository private, or upgrade to GitHub Pro. For more information, see "Removing a collaborator from a personal repository." If you're using GitHub Free and change a repository's visibility from public to private, you'll lose access to features like protected branches and GitHub Pages.

If you're using GitHub Team for Open Source, you can collaborate in public repositories only.

Private repositories have unlimited collaborators and full features on GitHub Pro, GitHub Team, and GitHub Enterprise Cloud. For more information, see "GitHub's products."

If you're converting your private repository to a public repository as part of a move toward creating an open source project, see the Open Source Guides for helpful tips and guidelines. You can also take a free course on managing an open source project with GitHub Learning Lab. Once your repository is public, you can also view your repository's community profile to see whether your project meets best practices for supporting contributors. For more information, see "Viewing your community profile."